Chapter Three — A Name
619 Words
Chapter Three — A Name
She didn't call the number.
She told herself it was because she was busy. The week after the masquerade was dense with obligations — two charity board meetings, a lunch with her mother's friends that she couldn't escape, and the quiet mountain of administrative work she handled for her father's foundation. Aria was good at being useful. She had spent most of her life perfecting it.
But the card stayed in her handbag.
She was aware of it the way you become aware of a sound you can't identify — not loudly, not constantly, but always there at the edge of attention, waiting.
On Wednesday evening she was sitting in her home office reviewing donation reports when her phone buzzed with an unknown number.
Are you counting anyone else's champagne sips tonight?
Aria stared at the message.
Her first reaction was surprise. Her second was a warmth that moved through her chest before she could stop it. Her third was the sobering reminder that she had never given him her number.
She typed back: How did you get this number?
The reply came quickly: I have my ways. Is that unsettling or charming?
Still waiting on honest, she wrote back before she could think better of it.
Three dots appeared. Then: Honestly — I asked around. You made an impression, Aria with no last name.
She almost smiled. You could have led with your last name too.
I could have, he replied. But then we would have spent the whole night being our last names instead of ourselves. I preferred the alternative.
Aria set her phone down on the desk and looked at the ceiling.
It was a good answer. It was too good an answer, which was precisely the problem. Men who attended events like the Venetian masquerade and gave good answers and watched you for eleven minutes before approaching did not do those things without intention. She knew that world. She had been raised in it.
And yet.
She picked the phone back up.
What is your last name? she typed.
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Voss, he wrote finally. Damien Voss.
Aria's hand went still.
The name landed in her chest like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples through everything.
Voss.
She knew that name. Everyone in her world knew that name — because for as long as she could remember, it had been spoken in her family home the way you spoke about bad weather or old wounds. With quiet, contained fury. With the particular bitterness of something unresolved.
Marcus Voss — Damien's father — had been her father's closest partner twenty years ago. Until he wasn't. Until something happened between them that neither family ever fully explained, something that had fractured a friendship and sparked a rivalry that had only grown colder and more calculated with every passing year.
Damien Voss.
She should put the phone down. She should close the conversation and delete the number and go back to her donation reports and never think about the man in the black suit again.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Good night, Damien Voss, she typed.
She pressed send before she could stop herself.
His reply came after a long pause.
Good night, Aria Sinclair.
So he had known too.
She sat very still in the quiet of her office and understood, with a clarity that felt more like a warning than a revelation, that they had both known exactly who the other was — and had chosen, in that warm ballroom with the chandeliers overhead, to be strangers anyway.
That was either the most foolish thing she had ever done.
Or the most honest.
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